The Benefits of Buying Used
By Manntis December 29, 2009
As time goes on and car manufacturers continue to produce more stable and reliable vehicles, the question arises that is there any benefit in buying a new car when a used car has many benefits?
I can think of many occasions when friends and family have chosen to part exchange in their existing vehicle for a new one every year or two, but nowadays it seems as though you are no better off buying a new vehicle than you are by purchasing a used one, and I’ll try and explain why.
Anyone who has ever bought a new vehicle and has come to the point of selling it some years later, has probably been in the situation where they’ll ask “Is that all it’s worth, I paid X amount for it only two years ago”. This is because the value of a new vehicle falls dramatically as soon as it is driven out of the showroom.
If value is important to you, finding a bargain of a used car can be very satisfying and also financially rewarding. There is sometimes the conception that buying a used vehicle can be risky and that it will end up with one problem or another, although, the skills of engineers over the past years has shown to produce cars that are more reliable and more maintenance-free than ever before.
(Even though this is possibly the case, the importance of performing vehicle checks on used vehicles is high as it can highlight any hidden past that a vehicle may have and also show any potential problems. It’s unwise to buy any kind of sports car – or Honda Civic – off a teenager, for example, without going over it with a fine tooth comb)
There is also another loss to consider; when a car is manufactured, it takes a substantial amount of energy to do so. While obviously gas guzzling cars aren’t doing the environment any favours, abandoning them to the scrap heap to get a fuel efficient vehicle just isn’t, well, as efficient as some would have you think. If you have an 80s car hauled off for scrap and buy a Prius, you’d have to drive that new, efficient car almost 200,000kms before the fuel you save makes up for the energy you threw away in the form of that older vehicle.
Then there’s the “shakedown cruise”. Whenever a new model comes out, some people flock to showrooms to buy the latest and be the first to own it. This can be fun; in 2003 a friend of mine who manages a Hyundai dealership once gave me a shiny Tiburon to drive for the weekend, right after the clean-sheet redesign, knowing it’d get out and get seen (back then I used to get invited to the hot parties). No one on the streets of my town had seen the car in the flesh, as it were, and heads were turning at every intersection. When I stopped at Subway on my way home, the kid behind the counter was so in awe of the looks of that “exotic” vehicle he put extra meat on the sandwich, telling me it was on the house.
But were the admiring looks and attention, which surely faded in just months as the cars became ubiquitous, worth the price premium? Even the admiring looks can be offset by the “shakedown cruise” factor. New cars can mean new problems unforseen by engineers in their cloistered cubicles – the road to being first on the block with the latest set of wheels is littered with the carcasses of cars that, in some cases, didn’t even make it home from the dealership. When Johnny Carson, an investor in Delorean Motor Company, picked up his brand new DMC-12 the alternator failed on the drive home. When the Camaro was re-released in 2009, there were reports of some battery cables being catastrophically sawn through after having been bent 90 degrees past a sharp alternator bracket. You get the idea.
But within a year or two these details are taken care of by Technical Service Bulletins (TSBs) and the car becomes a reliable dream machine.Where the first owner went through all the headaches, the 2nd owner gets a car that works as originally intended.
As technology improves,the durability and reliability of previously owned vehicles means that they are no less a value than a new car. As the price of new cars climbs, the popularity of used vehicles looks to continue to soar higher than ever. There are benefits to buying both types of vehicles, either new or used, but one thing for certain is that previously owned vehicles are more reliable than ever.
Submitted on December 29, 2009 in Tips.
D'Arcy (aka 'manntis') has owned several RX-7s over the years, including a 1985 GSL-SE that had once been the daily driver of Pamela Anderson. Named 'Pam' after its former owner, that car met an untimely death outside of Roger's Pass in the Canadian Rockies when the highway turned and, thanks to rain, the car didn't. D'Arcy started Rotorhead as a labour of love in 2002, tired of trying to find information on 1st gen RX-7s scattered throughout the internet.
Manntis has contributed 31 articles to Rotorhead.
